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“OKX was used to facilitate over five billion dollars’ worth of suspicious transactions and criminal proceeds,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Matthew Podolsky.
OKX Settles for $500M Following Guilty Plea in Anti-Money Laundering Case
Seychelles-based cryptocurrency exchange OKX pled guilty to one count of operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business and was slapped with a $504 million fine on Monday, according to a press release published by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The lawsuit alleges that between 2017 and 2024, OKX pretended to have a firm policy prohibiting U.S. persons from using its platform, but secretly allowed American citizens to make more than $5 billion worth of trades on the exchange. To add insult to injury, the exchange even assisted its U.S. clients with circumventing whatever lax controls it had superficially implemented.
It’s not clear what tipped off law enforcement, but eventually, OKX was caught red-handed and the evidence presented appears to have been so damning that the exchange decided to simply plead guilty and pay the gigantic $504 million fine.
“For years, OKX flagrantly violated U.S. law, actively seeking customers in the United States…and even going so far as to advise individuals to provide false information to circumvent requisite procedures,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Matthew Podolsky. “As a result, OKX was used to facilitate over five billion dollars’ worth of suspicious transactions and criminal proceeds.”
The lawsuit paints a picture of a brazen entity that showed flagrant disregard for U.S. laws. It alleges that OKX actively pursued U.S. clients and produced step-by-step instructional videos to coach them on exactly how to illegally open up OKX accounts.
In one instance, an OKX employee is quoted in the release as he walks a potential U.S. customer through the account registration process and tells the client to lie about his country of residence and to submit a fake ID number.
“I know you’re in the U.S., but you could just put a random country and it should go through,” the employee writes to the customer. “You could just put United Arab Emirates and random numbers for the ID number.”
Last year, Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, pled guilty to similar charges and received the largest fine ever levied in the industry, $4.3 billion. Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao was forced to resign from his CEO position and served four months in jail.